Prof. Dr. Hubert Zapf (University of Augsburg, Germany)
Trauma, Narrative, and Ethics in Recent American Fiction
The paper aims to explore the significance of trauma
as a narrative topic and an ethical challenge in selected works of recent
American fiction. Trauma represents a state of cultural or personal shock, disempowerment,
and victimization, and is connected with symptoms of repression, paralysis, and
personality disorder. Yet in literary texts, it can also become a starting
point for an often painful therapeutic process of regeneration, which goes
along with the radical questioning of established value systems and of deeply
entrenched concepts of self and other. Examples of traumatizing events that form
the narrative matrix of recent American novels are the historical experience of
Native Americans in World War II (Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony), the long-term effects of
slavery (Tony Morrison,), the Vietnam war (Philip Roth, The Human Stain), racism and antisemitism
(Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing), the post-holocaust 20th century (Siri
Hustvedt, What I Loved), and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (Don DeLillo, Falling
Man). In
these novels, traumatizing experiences are related from the viewpoint of
individual protagonists who are at the same time representative of different
ways of experiencing and coping with trauma. The ruptures of personal lives are
reflected in the disruption of narrative continuities, through which the
characters’ catastrophic loss of orientation and their fragile attempts at new
beginnings are transferred to the reading process. As the fictional mimesis of
other people’s pain, which ultimately resists discursive appropriation and
narrative control, literature represents a paradoxical form of responding to
cultural crises, and involves the reader in an ethics of textuality that
contributes significantly to a more general ethics of cultural memory and self-reflection. Beloved
